Megan Coffee

Megan Coffee, MD, PhD (DPhil) is a faculty member at the Grossman School of Medicine at New York University and is interested in emerging infectious diseases and epidemics, particularly in low resource settings. Her work incorporates mathematical and computational tools into outbreak response. She is an attending physician in infectious diseases at Bellevue Hospital in NYC and teaches on prevention and response to outbreaks in global health at Columbia University. She collaborates on developing AI tools to better identify emerging diseases like mpox and predict disease severity in COVID, while also looking at using machine learning to better recognize disease transmission, vaccine hesitancy, and infectious disease findings, while also looking at ethics in AI in infectious disease work.

She is an advisor on communicable diseases at the International Rescue Committee, where she had been involved directly on the ground in the Ebola response in Sierra Leone and supporting other infectious disease responses, from cholera to Lassa to HIV and TB, including in Nigeria, Bangladesh, Liberia, Kenya, Uganda, and Cote d'Ivoire. Through the IRC, she has worked with the WHO in Geneva, UN, CDC, US State Department, and other governments. She currently is involved in remote assistance for COVID response and assisting emergency medicine fellows using telemedicine in resource limited settings.

She is the founder and director of Ti Kay, Inc for over 10 years, supporting healthcare providers and telemedicine options for TB and HIV patients in Haiti after running an HIV/TB ward at the main public hospital in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti with a team of Haitian nurses for 4 years after the earthquake providing care for thousand of patients.

She completed her undergraduate and medical school education at Harvard University and her doctorate at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases at Oxford University, where she worked on programming mathematical models of infectious disease epidemics, focusing on HIV and population movement in southern Africa, in Professor Roy Anderson's group. She completed her residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and her fellowship in infectious diseases at University of California at San Francisco, with research at UC Berkeley. She also works as a telemedicine doctor, answering questions about COVID around the US.